Noam Ebner is a professor at Creighton University and former chair of Creighton’s online graduate degree program in negotiation and conflict resolution. Besides over twenty years of experience teaching negotiation and conflict topics at academic institutions around the world, Noam has practiced as an attorney, negotiator, mediator, and trainer. But long before that, he was a kid in a movie theater watching a ship getting pulled in with a tractor beam. With Prof. Jennifer Reynolds of the University of Oregon, he established the Star Wars and Conflict Resolution Project. The Project has just published Star Wars and Conflict Resolution, a book introducing the knowledge of the negotiation and conflict resolution fields to the general public of Star Wars fans ranging from I’ve-only-seen-one-movie-but-liked-the-Ewoks beginners to the I-can-recite-it-all-backwards-dare-me-to community. This book is about to be published and we'll take a quick look at it, go through its content, and discuss why we all need to read it!

In our chat, we recall our first encounters with the Star Wars universe and discuss what has fascinated us about it the most. We also talk about our favorit episodes and characters and how we interpred the light and the dark side of the Force. We hypothesize whether the war was avoidable and what had to be done to prevent it. Following which, Noam shares how he came up with the idea for a book that ties Star Wars with conflict resolution, explains the main idea behind it and why we shall read it. We also discuss the most important lessons we can learn from Star Wars for leadership and negotiation and the characters we can learn it from.